Too much to do?

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Slow is Smooth; Smooth is Fast. The 3S’s of making hard work easy.

This is a saying that I like to remember whenever I find myself frantically trying to catch-up on too much at once. Slow is smooth; smooth is fast.

I couldn’t find any definitive reference for where it originally comes from, although it often gets attributed to US Special Forces and even Napoleon is credited with saying something along the lines of “Dress me slowly; I’m in a hurry.”

I first heard it listening to a talk from Formula racing drivers – it’s apparently a good mindset for winning races and not spilling off the track in a corner!

The principle is easy to understand.

Rushing into things gives you less chance to assess the ultra-important 3S’s:

  • Sequence (what’s the best order in which to do things);
  • Strategy (what’s the best way to do them); and
  • Simultaneity (what’s the best number of things to be doing at once).

Over the years I’ve tried to figure out if Slow is Smooth; Smooth is Fast is best applied to either standard or non-standard tasks, but I think it works equally well both with things you’re familiar with doing (but have a lot of) and tasks that are unfamiliar.

Getting into the mindset of doing this well is similar to a flow-state (the subject of a future article on this website), in that it’s not something you push or try hard at. Instead, it’s about relaxing into things. As Yoda might have said: “Don’t try too hard; just do.”

Similarly, instead of trying to catch the racing car in front of you, it’s about making sure that you take the best line through the next corner, and the next corner and the one after that. That is fast.

“You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water into a cup, it becomes the cup. Become like water.”

Bruce Lee

As usual, please leave me a comment if they’re still open below, or tweet me @NickRobCoach. What’s your approach when you’ve got way too much to do and not enough time to do it?




Guarantees are on Electrical Products

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Is it time to take a big bet on yourself?

I’ve got a couple of projects on the go as I write this that are, in essence, big bets on myself and my abilities. They’re calculated bets, in that the odds are probably in my favour. But if I was playing totally safe and only betting on certainties, I wouldn’t be doing them.

When I’ve done this in the past, some have worked and some have failed. You win some and you lose some and, if you’re calculating your odds properly, hopefully you win more than you lose. But there’s no guarantee; guarantees are on electrical products, not your projects.

What are you dreaming of or working on now that needs you to take a big bet on yourself?

And how do the odds look on that one?

And what happens if you never bet on yourself?

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.

Ambrose Redmoon

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Wayne Gretzky

I reckon there’s a reason they call a sure thing a “dead cert” – because if you only bet on the sure thing, you might as well be dead. And if you don’t bet on yourself when you need to, who else will ever back you?

As usual, please leave me a comment if they’re still open below, or tweet me @NickRobCoach. What big bet on yourself do you need to take? And how do you get yourself in the right frame of mind to take that bet?




Intuition and Persuasion

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Having the guts to persuade other people to trust your intuition

I’ve heard it said that intuition is the result of our brains unconsciously processing thousands of bits of data. There’s good research to support this view and it makes sense when you think about how much of our daily actions we do on autopilot. For example, driving your regular route to work, without having to consciously think too much about directions and turns and traffic.

Others have written that intuition comes from combining years of experience with having a finger on the pulse of what’s actually happening now.

I read recently that the kilometres of neurones and nerve connections in our intestines are about the same size as the brain of a cat – an animal we admire for its cunning and fast-reactions. Maybe that’s reason enough to “trust your gut”!

There can’t be many good leaders around nowadays who don’t make an effort to tap into their own intuition, or at least to listen to what their gut is telling them.

But what can be much harder, is getting other people to trust your intuition.

This is something which comes up in my coaching with leaders and their teams fairly often. How do you get other people to trust your intuition? Especially as we’re increasingly in the kind of working world which stresses the use of metrics and which says things like: “What gets measured, gets managed”. In that situation, how do you justify a vague feeling that something important has been missed? How do you persuade people that your sense that everything is not quite right should be listened to?

For now, there’s one aspect of this that is really worth focusing on, which is about not waiting for permission to speak your intuition, and then doing so in a way that makes it acceptable.

The language you use is very important. This is especially useful in board meetings and other group situations (particularly if you’ve just spent an hour pouring over detailed financials and performance reports). You have to use the language of intuition, and know that it’s OK to do so. You can say things like the following, and know that they are perfectly acceptable, for the reasons discussed above:

  • “My gut is telling me X.”
  • “I don’t know quite where it’s coming from, but my intuition is that …”
  • “I’ve got a hard-to-define sense that we also need to consider Y.”

Leaders need to speak their intuition in a way that has impact, otherwise they’re ignoring the full range of their brain’s processing power and failing to use their experience.

As usual, please leave me a comment if they’re still open below, or tweet me @NickRobCoach. When and how do you speak your own intuition?




Go for it

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Click the image above and then right-click it to download a copy.



Thinking at work isn’t dead – is it?

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The smartest bloke I ever knew used to start his working day by putting his feet up on the desk. Is that still important?

I’d gone to work in his department from a demanding operational job and it was a shock to see all this apparent leisure happening. So I asked him what he was doing and got the predictable answer:

“Thinking!”

Just recently I’ve been coaching in a couple of organisations where the amount and quality of thinking left a lot to be desired!

Problems which could have been worked through seemed mystifying.
Rewarding opportunities, which a little bit of smart analysis would have highlighted, were lost in a frenetic chasing of the more obvious.

My smart boss was quite fierce about it:

“I recruited you to do the smart thinking too. So you’d better find your own way to make it happen.”

But it’s not just the business benefits that make good thinking so important. The future of work is going to be very different, just in the next few decades compared with today, driven by an exponential growth in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace. It might not be too strong to say that:

In the future, if you’re not thinking at work, you won’t be at work!

AI experts say that the human talents they believe machines and automation may not be able to replicate are primarily about:

  • creativity
  • collaborative activity
  • abstract and systems thinking
  • complex communication
  • the ability to thrive in diverse environments.

All of those require at least a modicum of good quality thought.

If you’re a business owner or a leader in a larger organisation:

  • How much good thinking are you doing yourself (whether you have your feet up on the desk or not)?
  • How do you make sure that your teams are doing enough good thinking?

As usual, please leave me a comment if they’re still open below, or tweet me @NickRobCoach. What kind of thinking is important in your work – and how do you make it happen?



(re)Invention

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Never be afraid to reinvent your business

Markets shift, owners change, leaders develop, teams evolve, products and services are born, mature and die.

There’s probably some good business school research somewhere that shows just how important it is to continually reinvent whilst staying true to your core. But you know in your heart this is true anyway.

Don’t let the thought of your “sunk costs” (the money and effort that you’ve spent but won’t recover) get in the way either. They are gone anyway. Learn and move on.

If you don’t reinvent your business somebody else will change theirs first, simply because they need to more than you do. Necessity is always the mother of (re)invention.

As usual, please leave me a comment if they’re still open below, or tweet me @NickRobCoach. What might get in the way of the reinvention your business needs?



Seven Essential Leadership Tools

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If you’re a visual person, you’ll love this. My seven most essential leadership tools – but can you name all seven?

Each of the images in the set above represents one of my most essential leadership tools. But I haven’t named them. The challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to correctly identify each of the seven leadership tools using only the image and your own brilliant perception.

As usual, please add a comment below if they’re still open, or tweet me @nickrobcoach – how many of the seven essential leadership tools could you name; what would you add or change?

Assumptions Afternoon

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The assumptions and the mind-reading are still rampant at work. Co-designing is the answer – if you’re brave enough

It’s been a while since I heard anybody do that old joke about Assume making an Ass out of U and Me. And yet still it goes on.

I’m still seeing people in meetings without a clear purpose. Still coaching people whose leaders haven’t talked about expectations. Still working with teams who haven’t figured out how they can best get on together.

For goodness sake people, stop it!

Trust yourselves enough to co-design your desired outcomes together. Talk together about what’s needed. Ask what’s expected of you. And make sure you help others be clear about what you expect of them. Have a conversation with your teammates about how you all work together. Plan collaboratively.

Do. Not. Assume.

As usual, please leave me a comment if they’re still open below, or tweet me @NickRobCoach. What drives you mad about the assumptions people make? What are your top tips for being more collaborative about what’s expected?


If you put down that hammer, I promise I won’t shout

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If you’re stuck in one typical way of doing things or only have one way of looking at things, how do you change?

Doing some group coaching recently with the board of a successful company that faces some big changes in its market. Unless they shift direction slightly, they’ve seen that they may not have a business at all in the space of just a few years!

So you can maybe understand why I wanted to shout at one director who was being amazingly intransigent and who seemed utterly and stubbornly unable to approach things through anything other than their usual way of looking at them. A person who was actually being part of the problem, if not even its cause, rather than part of the solution.

In the end I decided not to shout at them. I have tried this in the past; sometimes it’s worked and sometimes not. In this case I didn’t feel that shouting would help at all because the cause of this director’s intransigence is that old case of:

If your only tool is a hammer, after a while everything starts to look like a nail

And I’m pretty certain that this person knows they’re being stubborn and sticking to one, out-dated point of view and one inappropriate way of dealing with things.

It made me curious.

What if that was me, stuck there facing a difficult and uncertain future, wielding the wrong kind of tool but unable to put it down?

How do you get out of that? How do you help yourself to discover new ways of looking at things? How do you investigate new tools; different approaches for dealing with thorny problems?

There are two reasons why people, having metaphorically picked-up a hammer, are so reluctant to put it down and take fresh approaches:

  1. Habit
  2. Fear

Habit, because it works. This is why we develop habits. It’s terribly wasteful of energy and slow to do things in a new way every time. If you don’t have to think about it too much and it pretty much always works, why do it any differently? You’ve developed a skill, so use it. The trouble is of course that we become ossified, stuck within the boundaries of that way of doing it, even if that isn’t the best way. If we’re really skilled with a hammer, we can even bash a screw into place!

Instead of that skill being something that facilitates our achievements, it starts to define what and how we can achieve.

Fear, because it’s nature’s way of helping us to survive. Don’t think, there isn’t time. There’s a threat right here. Stick to what you know and apply that now. Attack, run, hide; fight, flight or freeze – stick to whichever of those you’re good at. It takes a brave person to say “Hold on, maybe we should take a fresh approach to this threat. Maybe I’m not seeing the whole picture here, or I’m stuck in one way of doing things and that isn’t helping.”

Really we need to practice these things before there’s a crisis. Learn new tools before they’re needed. Get used to taking a different perspective even when we don’t need to, when our usual way of looking at things is enough. Make space for curiosity for curiosity’s sake.

Some simple stuff about beginning to shift habits for you to try out yourself:

  • If you regularly commute, when was the last time you took a different route home, just to see what that was like?
  • Where do you usually holiday (same place or different places?) and how much exploring do you do when you’re there?
  • What type of entertainments do you prefer – and how much do you switch those around?
  • What working habits have you not changed in the last two, five or even ten years?
  • Are you sitting in the same desk, facing the same way today that you were this time last month or last year?
  • When did you last visit an art gallery? And when did you last visit an art gallery to deliberately see art that you don’t ‘get’?

And the same applies to fear. Fear hijacks our brain and gets us into that fight, flight or freeze straightjacket. When we’re in there, it’s hard to get out.

So we need to practice and become familiar with our fears in advance:

  • What are you afraid of?
  • What keeps you awake at night?
  • What are your deepest concerns about your business?
  • What do you not want people to find out about your own perceived inadequacies?
  • What can’t you let go of?

The more familiar we can become with our fears, the less power they have over us. The more flexible we can be with our habits, they more they become skills to help us, and not shackles to bind us.

Please let me know in the comments below, or by tweeting me @nickrobcoach, what you’re finding out about your own habits and fear, and how you’ve developed flexibility of approach.

Can’t Keep Up?

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Feel like you can’t keep up?
12 ways to simplify your leadership

Do you want to work as quickly and efficiently as possible, so you can finish early and still have time and energy to do other stuff? You’re not alone. More and more I’m seeing people who say they want to do more at work, enjoy more time with their family, and have more time to relax, but that their actual focus is on “keeping up.”

It may be that you’re temporarily in a really tricky situation and you just need to get out the other side of it. But if not; if that sense of not being able to keep up at work is persisting longer than it should, take a look at these short tips for breaking the pattern.

1. Identify your Top 1 – 3 priorities for the day

And once you’ve identified them, do these first thing in your day, or do them in your quality time, or scrub-out something else. Remember, you’ve either chosen to work on your own priorities, or you’ve chosen to forward somebody else’s agenda.

2. 80% is More Than Good Enough

Identify what level of %age completion/quality is right for the task you’re involved with and don’t go 1% over. Perfect is the enemy of good.

3. Delegate the ‘What’ not the ‘How’

Make sure you’re only delegating ‘outcomes’ and not telling people how to achieve those outcomes. Be prepared to live with people taking a different approach to the way you might have done it. This is the ONLY option if you don’t want to, or can’t, do everything yourself – which you don’t and cant’!

4. Don’t use your Email In-tray as a To-Do app

It doesn’t work. It DOESN’T work. Email is for communication, not task-management. Get a simple to-do app and use that instead. If your email in-tray is overflowing, make a separate folder, dump everything into there and start again with a blank in-tray, this time using a separate app to record to-do’s.

5. Manage all your Emails (and other In-boxes) using the 5-Minute RAFT Formula

Everything that arrives in your various inboxes should be dealt with using the 5-minute RAFT approach, as follows:

  • R is for Reading – can you read an item in 5 minutes or less – and do you really, really need to read it? If so, read it when it arrives, otherwise, bung it into a Reading File and wait ‘til it’s a priority. Or Trash it.
  • A is for Action – can you action item in 5 minutes or less – and do you really, really need to do it? If so, action it when it arrives, otherwise, bung it into your To-Do app and do it when it’s a priority. Or Trash it.
  • F is for File – can you file an item in 5 minutes or less? If so, file it now. If not, wtf is it!?
  • T is for Trash – this is my favourite. Trash it. Hit delete. Gone and forgotten. Should be your default setting – can I legitimately just hit delete or chuck this in the bin and not get emotionally-hooked.

6. Under-schedule and Over-deliver

Rather then over-schedule and under-deliver! This is strongly linked with Items 1 and 12. The best way to do more is to try and do less. Focus, focus, focus. How jammed is your calendar, how hectic is your travel schedule? “Less is more” people.

7. Ask people for their ideas

Not only is this a good way to get and stay engaged with people, you’ll end up with new and different solutions that you wouldn’t have thought. Takes a bit longer in the short-term, delivers better quality and takes the load off of you in the medium-term.

8. Know and Say your Leadership Mantra

All leaders should be able to say what the strategic aim for their organisation or department is. “What we need to do is X, Y and Z.” Repeat this whenever and wherever until you’re sick of hearing it. And then repeat it some more. This way of simplifying really helps others to get behind the programme and take-up more of the effort themselves. You’ll be more than pleasantly surprised when you hear people repeating your mantra unprompted.

9. Work through People and on Tasks

And the more senior you become, the less you should be working on tasks and the more you should be working through people. Check how your current balance is on this and see if you need to spend more time leading and less time doing. See also 10 below.

10. One-to-one Meetings are your Main Tool for Working through People

There isn’t a better way to get things done than to sit down with your people individually and coach them through their own priorities. I’d give at least one day a week to doing this for every four team members I have. Use this Coaching formula:

  • What Outcomes are they working towards?
  • What’s in the Current Situation that you and they need to be aware of?
  • What Approaches have they tried or do they want to take?
  • What Support do they need?
  • How will you know when it’s Worked?

11. Build Relationships

I bang on about this all the time. Relationships are the key to getting stuff one in organisations.

“It’s not what you know.

It’s not even who you know.

It’s how well do you know the right people?”

Nick Robinson

When was the last time you prioritised coffee with a colleague just for the sake getting to know each other better?

12. Leaders think Short, Medium AND Long-term

So often we under-estimate what can be done in the long-term and over-estimate what can be done in the short-term. The key is to plan on all three time-horizons. What’s my priority for this year, for this month, for today – and how do they link together?

I hope those help a little? Give me a shout – add a comment below if they’re still open, contact me here, or tweet me @NickRobCoach if there’s something not covered or if you’d like to add one of your own tips.